


of strange lips yesterday

by OfShoesAndShips



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Anonymity, Fantasizing, Holiday Season of Kink 2018, M/M, Norrell in denial, Pornography, Trans Male Character, Unbeta'd, this is going to be posted rsd be damned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-21 08:58:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17040734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfShoesAndShips/pseuds/OfShoesAndShips
Summary: Norrell's denial is shattered after a strange book - probably sent by mistake, but oddly alluring anyway - arrives on his doorstep.(Written with the inspiration of the Holdiay Season of Kink, but not posting there because i'm not entirely sure it counts.)





	of strange lips yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Algernon Charles Swinburne's Fragolletta:
> 
>  
> 
> _I dreamed of strange lips yesterday_  
>  _And cheeks wherein the ambiguous blood_  
>  _Was like a rose's — yea_  
>  _A rose where it lay_  
>  _Within the bud_
> 
>  
> 
> Forgive me, Algie, for not making this fic quite as sexy and masochistic as you would have liked. Tried, though.

It was a thin sketchbook, a little larger than his hand if he stretched his fingers. Bound in red leather, rippled with ink and water stains. The spine was faded to a brownish tone, and the leather at the bend was slightly strained, as if it had spent more time open than closed. Norrell rubbed his thumb across it; it was dry, no longer supple, as if it had been stored somewhere too cold for it. Perhaps it was a book of magic that one of his suppliers had found in their stores and sent on. Yet, if that were so, they surely would have sent a letter with it, an invoice. He looked again at the folded brown paper that had wrapped it and poked the pile. There was no letter, no note; he would at any rate have found it as he folded the paper up.

He opened the book with caution, in case it contained some danger; it was not unknown for books of magic to have traps laid upon them. Marbled end papers in green and purple, crinkled at the edges with water damage. Norrell laid his paper knife between the book and its wrapping paper, in case he had to separate some of the pages. There was a signature on the endpaper, faded and flourished, and after a few moments of close attention he decided it read _Edwin Morgan_. Not a name he knew; perhaps a magician from one of the societies that had disbanded. He had sent Childermass to shut down the Flint society just a few weeks ago; perhaps this Morgan had been one of them.

He opened his mouth to ask Childermass if he knew of a man named Edwin Morgan who may have had some dissatisfaction with him, and then closed it. Childermass, of course, was doing something in Cheshire. It had not had a direct bearing on the books he was currently searching for and so he had not been entirely listening.

It seemed quieter in Childermass’s absence, although he was not the kind of man who frequently made his presence known. The library seemed larger, more open. Norrell looked around for a moment, as if Childermass would suddenly appear at his desk or standing before the window, sitting in one of the armchairs he had recently installed in front of the fire without reference to what Norrell said, desired, or otherwise asked for. Still, it was a little cool at his desk, and so he picked up the book and the paper knife and got up, walking over to the fire and sitting down in the leftmost chair. The leftmost was the more comfortable; it caught more of the warmth and none of the draught from the window. The fact that Childermass always sat in the right-hand one made no difference.

He turned the next page with the point of the paper knife, and frowned when it revealed not the crabbed writing common to all magicians, nor any scent of magic at all. Instead small sketches scattered the page, in thin, soft pencil. He turned the book, and realised the thin lines made hands; some folded, some stretched, some bent as though straining. They were delicately, carefully drawn, as if the artist had spent a long time observing even such a small thing as the taut skin between thumb and finger. They had been drawn with such detail that had Norrell been so inclined he could have read a fortune from the palm. As it was, he turned to the next page, and found a face; turned away from the artist, and bowed, all but hidden by a fall of hair. It covered both pages, and he could see the sharp initial lines below the softness; they carved out the corner of a fine jaw, the thin curve of an ear. The neck, where the hair had been brushed away, was slightly shadowed; the dip of an unsketched collarbone, the stretch of tendons. Norrell rested his fingers on the page, where the shadow of the collarbone hinted at its shape. A sharp and indelicate chin, the hint of a lower lip puckered with quick lines, the edge of a long and narrow nose. For a moment Norrell could see a low-ceilinged room, small-windowed and candlelit, easels and canvases and paint scattered across the floor. Edwin Morgan, sitting on a stool with the book open in his lap while a woman sat on the floor in front of him, her hair over one bare shoulder. A cautious intimacy about it, perhaps, or a professional lack of embarrassment.

He found the same face again on the following pages, again half hidden; here laid back upon broad lines that indicated a cushion, turned away but pointed upward, this time; the neck a sharper, more arching shape, the jaw clearer and tensed, mouth a little open. A hint of closed eyelid, dark with lashes.

Norrell closed the book and put it beside him on the low table. He could not see this sketchbook suddenly turning into a book of magic halfway through – a man who spent so long on replicating the curve of a lip would not, surely, be so disorganised as to begin a second book in the middle of the first. The sender must have mistaken him for some other Norrell, the kind of man who welcomed anonymous parcels. He decided he would wait for Childermass to return, and see what could be done to return the book whence it came.

The firelight caught the red leather, and then fell away.

~

The next day dawned late and overcast, with long shadows; Norrell drifted into the library later than usual, having spent a longer while than usual tucked inside his robe in front of the parlour fire with a large, weak tea. A letter had arrived with the morning post, in Childermass's long handwriting with a Welsh return address. Apparently he had been waylaid by a man called Bulkeley having died rather suddenly, leaving a potentially esoteric library and a profiteering heir. Norrell, then, would be alone for a week or so longer; he would be stuck with the sketchbook on his side-table for rather longer than he thought seemed fair.

The day’s dreary weather made cold corners; Norrell sent Dido for his robe and wrapped himself back up in it, tucking his feet under himself at his desk. Yet Pale could not hold his interest; he kept finding himself fiddling with the edge of the robe where it was starting to feather, the pens on his desk, the marble paperweight whose heft he had always found pleasing. When Hannah drifted in with tea, humming softly, in the middle of the morning, he found he could hardly admonish her for disturbing him; she looked askance at him, sitting silent.

“I’ll light the fire, shall I, sir?” she asked, standing with the tea tray under one arm like a laundrymaid, the other hand in her pocket. He should admonish her for that, too, but all he said was:

“If you would,” and got on with pouring himself some tea.

She hummed a little louder as she laid the fire and he ignored her; yet he noticed when she stopped, and looked up. She was standing a little way back from the fire, looking down at the book on the side-table.

“Branching out, sir?” she asked.

“It was sent to me by mistake,” he said, stirring in some sugar.

She picked it up and leafed through it; he could see, in the firelight, a familiar sideways smile. It had an edge to it he wasn’t sure how to interpret.

“You can dispose of it.”

She looked at him and closed the book, laying it back down. “I think John ought deal with that, sir,” she said, and she sounded like she might have been laughing.

Confused, Norrell watched her leave, and then went with his tea in one hand over to the chair. He sat down again as he had the previous night and picked the sketchbook back up.

He opened it to the next page, and was suddenly arrested by a drawing of what he presumed to be the same model, standing with her back to the artist; her arms were upstretched, the dip of her spine rendered in shadows so soft as to evoke candlelight; startled, he followed the dip upwards until it vanished between her shoulderblades; her neck and head were hidden in the folds of a chemise she was pulling over her head.

He should have moved on; yet the lines were rendered with such delicacy that he lingered. She was lit from one side, the lines there thin in contrast to the darker, thicker lines on her other side. Soft lines where her skin stretched over her ribs; a touch of a roll at the base of her spine. Norrell’s thumb spasmed; the edge of his nail coming to rest where her elbow vanished off the page. The cream of the paper took on the softness of worn linen; he found himself tracing the top edge of the page, as if he could feel the fabric between his fingers.

He reached, half absently, for his tea, and sat there with it just below his mouth for a moment. His thumb traced down the sketched dip of the woman’s spine, and for a moment – just the scantest moment – he considered the skin there, it’s soft unwornness, untainted by exposure. His fingers slipped slightly on the teacup and a splash landed on the page, startling him. The tea spread, soaking into the lines and darkening the woman’s skin until it was a colour more brown than cream. Norrell lifted the next few pages, fanning them out between the fingers of his free hand so that they did not stick together. It was only a small splash and the room was warm now – the tea dried quickly, and the pages were stained but only a little – and so Norrell relaxed. He had barely realised the tightness in his shoulders until there was no more cause for it. He drank his tea, still holding the pages fanned between his fingers but otherwise ignoring the book still in his lap. Yet something about it lingered; his eyes kept straying back, although the drawings were no longer visible.

Halfway through his tea he found a strange tension in him, a tight line from one side of his chest to the other; the kind of tension he felt when he was reading a book of magic, the kind of tension that felt only ever half-released, the desire to continue that would turn in time to a shiver in his fingertips, a peculiar over-consciousness.

With care and without rushing, he finished his tea and poured himself another cup. When he had finished the second, he allowed himself to turn back and to let the pages fall from his fingers. The next page was another set of smaller studies; mouths, this time, ever the same one; closed and in half-profile, thin and half-downturned; slightly open, as if in quiet speech or sigh; twisted, teeth visible, the slightest edge of tongue.

Norrell shifted, glancing away toward the teapot and then to the fire. There, the shiver in his fingers; a pressure as if his hands were being pressed. He swallowed; his gaze fell back to the page.

Open mouth, lips far parted; there, a bowing of the bottom lip under the pressure of teeth. Here the angle tilted, as if the model had her head thrown back; she was smiling, and the angle of it made the expression look overlong and twisted, all up on one side. He paused, traced it with the edge of his nail. He pictured, half unconsciously, its dry softness, the low tobaccoed pitch of the voice that might escape it. He pressed his tongue to the sharp edge of his teeth and turned the page. Here, a new position; a scantily sketched bed, the model on her back and drawn from the floor – one knee bent, her bare torso half-hidden and foreshortened, her face only visible in a spare profile. A wide thigh, tensed, visibly muscled, flowing into a thin and sharp-boned hip. Quick-sketched shadow filled the dip of her waist, and shy lines curved around her barely-drawn chest – the hint of it enough to show her shape, to have Norrell curl and uncurl his fingers.

Her fallen hair stretched across the sheets that became, in the absence of line, the free paper; its wildness was only suggested and yet seemed so vivid, so tangible, that her hair all but twisted around Norrell’s fingers.

Norrell closed the book and put it aside. This was foolish. Childermass would be back in a few days; he would dispose of the book then and Norrell need not think of it any more.

~

It remained there, on his sidetable, for the rest of the day; lurking in the corner of his eye. He would not have called it alluring, and yet; he had not thought a book that consisted of nothing but drawings would be able to evoke in him the anxiousness of something unread. It was with that tight tension, the feeling of the unfinished, that when Norrell left the library for the night he took the book with him. He was still concerned there would be some quality to it that meant it was best supervised; perhaps there was some spell laid upon it that would react when certain circumstances were met. For a moment he considered, as he passed, leaving the book on his desk in the study; that was safer than the library, though there were still some books in there and of course all of his notes. He passed the study door by unopened. The parlour would be safer still; there were no books at all there, and no notes; only some furniture he didn’t much like. But the parlour was unwarded, and so if there were some kind of spell upon the sketchbook it would be free to go about its business without hindering. He passed the parlour door by unopened.

The last door here, on the corridor that twisted and turned along the tangled lines of the De Chepe’s labyrinth and had never belonged in truth to the stones of Hurtfew was the one that marked his destination. Warded as well as the library, but free of books and notes, barring the few he found no worth in but had kept anyway.

He opened it, locked it behind him, and put the book on the counterpane before dressing himself for bed.

This room, he thought as he undid the buttons on his waistcoat with slow and awkward care, could have been the model for what little suggestion of a room there had been in Morgan’s sketches; soft firelight catching on low eaves, wide and milken bed. He thought of the figure as he pulled his nightshirt on over his head, the way his shape – like hers, unlike hers – might catch that firelight and contrast against those sheets. He climbed into the bed from the other side, leaving the book undisturbed on the counterpane; it lay there, given room as if it were a strange body, until Norrell found himself chafing at its presence and reached for it. Lain slightly tangled in his sheets and twisted sideways, he slowly flicked through the pages until he reached his place. There, where he had left her, she was spread on sheets like these; he paused for a moment over those thin and gentle lines. Something about it felt like pressure, in his throat and faintly on his ribs. That shifting tremble in his fingertips as he turned to the following page.

Another angle on the same pose; her chest more visible, this time, the lines easy and flowing more naturally than those in what little art Norrell had seen. At this angle her face rested against her folded arm, tucked into quickly drawn shadow. The long line of her neck, the tautness of the tendons and the dip into her collarbone. Her dark hair was splayed out, away from her face; her nose before it vanished in shadow crooked slightly, faintly, and her mouth, closed and peaceful, had a twist to its corner that seemed now to be distantly familiar.

For a moment he traced the line of her closed mouth, pausing over that slightest twist; the stretched tendons in her neck called him next and his nail, soft against the paper, seemed almost to catch against skin. He wished those eyes open; he felt himself already arrested by the stare he half-knew they would hold, the edge of easy dark in them. He rubbed the corner of the page between his fingers, half turning it, and there by the edge of his thumb was a detail that had not been there in any other drawing. _Frances,_ in a cramped but looping hand. The irony itched; the desire to quiet it turned the page for him. Here she sat on the edge of the bed, hands gripping it; the tightness of the grip bowed the mattress, creased the sheets; Morgan’s pencil had rendered it with such care that he could all but hear the quiet sound of the linen in her grasp. The soft thinness of her stomach; the sharpness of her ribs just visible under the light curve of her breast; her shoulders broad but narrow somehow; the bones and fine muscles clear. A stronger curve in her upper arms, a strength her position had not yet shown. Thin wrists, long fingers; a careful shaped darkness wrapping around her right forearm that when he traced it became coiled, twisting rope. Too flatly drawn to be real, he wondered at what circumstances would lead her to have herself written upon so, what history.

Her hair was tied this time; it hung, plaited, over one sharp shoulder, the ends of her hair resting at the swelling of her chest. He was shy of her face, somehow; it was not bowed but nor was she looking at him, her chin tipped up and her eyes cast down. Her name this time was written beside her on the sheets, darker and less cramped. He rested his thumb on it, traced back and forth; he wondered again at the rope on her arm, at the careful relationship between her and Morgan’s pencil. Were there painted versions of her hanging above rich men’s mantels, an anonymised repainting in bowers of the figure here in a dark attic? It would not suit her, Greek colouring though she may have; she was too sharp a woman for flowers and pastoral drownings. She sat on the edge of that bed as though she were about to stand, perhaps to see to the fire; bare feet across soft rugs and cold floorboards. To come back to bed with a slight and ignored shiver; to trace her fingers over the body that warmed her bed, to touch with slow ease and no little delicacy. To coax shyness and temper boldness, to press and shift and breathe over heated skin. Norrell shifted in his tangled sheets, pressing his teeth into his lip. Sense called on him to close the book; his shyness of her face, of meeting a soft-drawn gaze, decided him. Shut away between red leather she vanished out of existence; the moonlight was not moved by her shadow, nor the sheets by her weight and the grasping of her hands.

~

A note preceded Childermass’s early return by a matter of only hours; relief would have suffused him at the sight of Childermass’s hand but for the way the knowledge of the book, still now up in his room, choked it at first sight. Yet still something in him seemed tenser, stretched, knowing that Childermass was returning. He bounced between the library and the study, unsettled; though it was never his wont to conduct his business downstairs, waiting for the return, he felt still as though part of him stood by the front door or sat in the drawing room windowseat, one eye on his book and the other on the track. Once this morning already he had almost dropped his tea on the carpet and put back a book on entirely the wrong shelf. He had written profuse notes and discarded them all; he had snapped at the housemaid and earned one of Hannah’s hard looks.

When Childermass did arrive it was quiet; Norrell thought he had felt Childermass arrive but had called himself fanciful until the library door was opened by the shove of a familiar shoulder and a fresh teapot placed on his desk by familiar thin hands along with a large, scruffily wrapped parcel.

“Courtesy of Llew Buckeley.”

“And a dirty roadside, it appears.”

A sharp and slightly derisive huff of breath; the pass of Childermass’s hip by the desk and the touch of his fingertips against its edge. Somehow now it scared him, just faintly, to look up and see that face. He felt unaccountably nervous of those features he knew so well, as if something would have changed them. As if looking on them would make something real, or prove it unreal.

“Tell the government to furnish Welsh roads with good paving, if it displeases you.”

“Much good that that would do.”

He did not have to look away from his book to know Childermass’s eloquent shrug when it made an appearance. Norrell waited until Childermass was safely sat at his desk before reaching for the parcel and cutting the string with his paperknife. Red leather stared at him and stricken he pushed the parcel away; unsecured the books toppled off the desk and fell to the floor in a series of shuddering thuds.

“Tha reet?” Childermass’s voice was faintly higher, when startled, though his words broader; he stood up to retrieve the books and Norrell shrank back, curling in on himself. “Mr Norrell?”

“I thought I had seen something,” Norrell managed, as Childermass put the books back on the desk and Norrell found them a different shape and style altogether than the one upstairs.

Childermass clicked his tongue, without reproof, and Norrell dared a glance at his face. Nothing about it had changed; the sharpness of his jaw and faint darkness on the side of his chin, his upper lip, the thin mouth and twisted nose, the soft darkness of his eyes. “Tha reet?” he asked again, quieter now and lower.

Norrell nodded.

Childermass went and sat back down, moving in that slow way he had when he was clearly expecting Norrell to stop him; but Norrell didn’t, and so Childermass sat down with a thump and a carelessly buried sigh and went back to his accounting, or whatever it was he was catching up on after altogether too long an absence.

He seemed closer than he ought to; the nothing that had changed included the library, of course, and yet Norrell felt as though the room had shrunk around them. Childermass was writing something; head bowed slightly as he concentrated. The part of his hair that was never long enough to stay at its station in his queue fell forward as Norrell watched; he let it be, obscuring his face, for a few moments and then pushed it back. He didn’t let go of it but spun it slowly in his fingers. Let it unspin; twisted it again. There was something strange about Childermass, like this, cast half in shadow; the low light of the afternoon catching on odd parts of him like his jaw and the side of his shoulder. Calm and quiet light, without tension – creamy soft, delicate against his sharpness.

“What am I, a muse?”

Childermass’s voice was low enough that it took Norrell a few moments to realise it was directed at him. He almost spluttered something in reply but saved himself in time, retreating instead to look down vaguely, and for once uninterestedly, at the new books.

~

He dismissed Childermass early; earlier than was perhaps his wont, because Childermass gave him a long and unsubtle look as he left the library. Still the distance from Childermass soothed him a little, and the walk to his own bedroom let silence settle on him, as if he were on his own in the house once more, as if he were free once more. He found a little shiver in his shoulders as he discarded his dressing-gown, a little anticipatory tension in his hands as he undid the buttons of his shirt. He found he could think of little else but what awaited – the feeling was so thick it felt it had been growing for days, though it had not even been a full one. Norrell had had barely a thought in his head all day for the books that Childermass had brought home – barely even a thought to share with Childermass himself, which may have been partly to blame for the unsubtlety of that long look.

Norrell paused when he got into the bed. There seemed too much light. The fire was low but still spread light like warm butter; the candle by the bed too pointed. A little moonlight seemed invisible when compared to the light in the room but he knew from experience the bulk that it added to the candle and the fire. With a vague sense that he was acting before he could catch up to himself he snuffed the candle. He was right; without the candle the moon lit the room well enough, in the kind of soft and colourless light that fit the little red book that had found its way into his hand without him realising. There, the countless hands he could recognise now as hers; her bowed head, the stretch of her neck and fall of her hair. The sharp edge of her shoulder blades, the dip of her spine; her upraised knee and tossed head. He paused on the sketch of her sat on the edge of the bed; again something in him transplanted her until he felt her, until he felt her movement in the same heavy, airless way he knew when Childermass had arrived home. Her long, long fingers and the way they might drift across the posters of the bed as she walked to the fire; the purposeful, regardless way he knew she would walk, as if she barely thought anyone would be watching and less care. The way she would turn her hair in her fingers, absently, shifting it hither and thither as if it annoyed her. The way she would swear quietly under her breath if things didn’t go the way she had wanted, quietly enough that Norrell would know she’d meant him not to hear. The way her voice would shift, higher when she was disturbed and lower when she had just woken. The tobacco that would linger on her, and the edge of something else – clove, perhaps – that said she was not quite as without vanity as she attempted to pretend.

He found himself swallowing, so taken by the image of her he was building, the image of her that seemed almost as if it had been waiting there it was so very vivid, that he hadn’t noticed how oddly restless he felt, how taut; he had been tracing his fingers back and forth over the narrow line of her dipped jaw until the paper pilled.

Norrell stopped, resting his fingers there. Childermass’s presence had woken some awareness in him of this, of what this was – that it was not some vague thing that existed only in certain spaces and at certain times, but a reality, as much as he may shift circumstances to allow him to pretend. He had thought – he thought now – that would mean he would no longer allow himself this, that he would have discarded it, and her.

He could see new lines of her through the paper and turned the page. For a moment he thought this only a copy of the earlier pose; on the bed, lain back, her head tipped, her leg raised. There seemed to be a greater tension in it; her back, faintly arched, her head thrown further back than usual in even languorous rest.

Awareness pricked at him before he saw the other figure; carelessly sketched, lacking detail, all but hidden by her bent leg. Their body pressed against the bed, a slight glimpse of her heel pressed against the other’s back. Norrell half-shivered; the atmosphere in that sketched room seemed changed – not broken, but tighter; time there, slow and sweet, had turned cloying. The low anticipation he had been feeling since he left the library had turned pitch-thick, tense and trembling; his heel, pressed hard into the mattress, sheets caught on his curled toes. Her breathlessness, the restless lines; Norrell’s nails dug into his palm. For a second his eyes closed, but he could see her all the stronger then – hear her shallow gasps, the shift of the sheets as she shifted. The clutch of her fingers in his hair, how easy and how hard it would be to look up and watch her, the rise and fall of her chest, the slight twist of her shoulders. Vague half-words in a low voice, the sharp movement of her hips. Perhaps the press of her knees against his hips; the wide thighs and thin calves, the softness of her skin, her shiver as he breathed. The way she looked, stretched there; the sharpness of her jaw, her mouth that still twisted, even open and half-sighing, her nose turned with a break, those dark eyes as they caught his. Norrell paused there, for a moment, and in pausing was taken with a strange sensation, an odd falling rush; how little it took for Frances’s sharp-drawn face to become Childermass’s - how easily the one fit over the other. How simple it was, without the testimony of Morgan’s pencil, to replace one with the other.

He roused himself and blinked; an unsteady tremble had overtaken him, a low-pitched, viscous thing. A weight all through him, a half-exhaustion. In his shiftings the book had fallen to the floor, open to a sketch of her face. He found himself, almost asleep and vision vague, seeing another moulded over her thin-drawn face, and the pages aching with a soft familiarity.

~

Childermass was not there when Norrell made his way to the library the next morning, and he was not there when Hannah put her head in the door and told him tea and breakfast was waiting in the parlour. Nor had he appeared by the time Norrell had finished his chocolate, nor did he appear to steal the crusts from Norrell’s toast and half a spoon of marmalade as he sometimes did when he was running ever so slightly behind. In fact it took until Norrell had chosen himself some books and retreated to the study for Childermass to make himself known, stomping in of a wuther and coming into the study with his hair wild and straw-stuck, in his shirtsleeves with the cuffs up to his elbows. Norrell attempted to spare only a half-glance for him, but it became a full and startled look when he saw the state of him.

“Did we start running a public house?” he asked, shifting in his seat as Childermass sat down at his own desk and stretched his arms back.

Childermass half-laughed, seemingly unaware of himself. “Brewer lost a shoe on those Welsh roads and the farrier came before you were up. Lent a hand, since he’s not the most sociable horse.”

“That does not explain why you still forgo your cuffs.”

“You’ve seen forearms before. You have your own.”

Norrell snorted. “Not as far as anyone but you has seen.”

“I should spend the day like this to spite you,” Childermass said, easily, poking at some scratch or something on his arm.  There was something there around his wrist Norrell at first took for a bruise, stretching from one side to the other; it was dark, black perhaps, but Childermass moved as if it hardly pained him.

“You are already more that impertinent enough,” Norrell said, watching as Childermass turned his wrist, following that apparent scratch.

Norrell saw the tail end of the bruise for what it was – a tangled and blurring sketch of rope. A slight sound escaped him, and Childermass looked over at him with an eyebrow raised.

“I think if you haven’t sacked me yet, you won’t.”

Norrell opened his mouth to reply but found no words waiting; no sharpness to end on, no indignant clucking that would make the very corner of Childermass’s mouth stretch up.

Childermass’s waiting expression fell into concern, and his mouth opened as if to say something gentle, another _tha reet_? – but Norrell could see it now, or at least could see something, and he stood up in a rush.

“Forgive me,” he said in half a voice as he all but stumbled to the door, “I feel a little unwell. The milk must have soured.”

He tried to close the door behind him gently but couldn’t be sure he’d managed it; the walk through the labyrinth to his bedroom took more of his concentration than he would have liked. That second door he let close as hard as it liked, and sat on the edge of his bed in strange parody of the sketch. He tried to think that it was only curious, a tangled rope around two coincidentally connected wrists, but something in him rebelled at that. Something in him that perhaps had known from the first that there was more than chance at him being sent that book.

Childermass had never shown a single sign, said one part of him, but another reminded him how easily Childermass had accepted Norrell’s own strangeness. At the time Norrell had put it down to the worldliness Childermass had always carried with him, even at nineteen, but he wondered now. Childermass could have said – but he was so intensely private, always, and perhaps it unnerved him too much to admit even that which could hardly be taken amiss. Had Childermass sent the book to him? He was a more forthright man than that. Besides, he would have recognised the hand.

His height – but Norrell had known tall women – Hannah was tall, only just shy of Childermass’s height. His stubble – but perhaps there was some charm that Norrell had not found, something hidden and half-forgotten. His voice – but Norrell had never known him not to smoke. Nor had Norrell ever seen him without his layers, or for that matter watched the shape of him too closely for fear of unsettling him.

There was a soft thud on the door. Not a knock; the sound, for Norrell well knew it, of Childermass leaning his back against the door.

“I’m decent,” Childermass said, in a careless but, Norrell knew, studied tone.

Norrell could not find it in himself to reply.

“Mr Norrell.”

Norrell looked at the book there on the bedside table, reached out and traced the corner of it. “The door is unlocked,” he said.

He heard Childermass shift away, and then watched the knob turn. Tension in his stomach like a turned and tangled copy of last night. If he were wrong- but he was not wrong. He knew that, now. Had known it, he thought, for longer than he had admitted to himself.

Childermass walked in, cautious. Already he drifted, like Norrell had imagined. He was buttoned-up, now; he had neatened his hair and found his jacket. His shirt cuffs poked out, butting up against his hands. For a second Norrell could see those hands tight in sketched sheets and he looked at the floor, flushed.

Out of the corner of his eye he watched as Childermass moved; the way he stood as he surveyed. The way he went still, how his hand reached out and touched the red leather as Norrell’s had just a few minutes before.

“Haven’t seen this in a while,” he said.

Norrell swallowed, found he still could hardly speak.

“Edwin died, you know. Recently. It was his funeral delayed me.”

“I’m sorry,” Norrell found himself saying.

Childermass, still out of the corner of Norrell’s eye, half-shrugged. “It was a long time ago I knew him.”

“Did you-” Norrell broke off, but Childermass seemed to understand him anyway.

“We were both only making a living.”

“Oh.”

“Jealous?” Childermass asked, sounding like he was trying to lighten the air that had grown heavy and thick around them.

“Yes,” Norrell said, quite without his own permission. He felt himself flush and closed his eyes.

Childermass made no sound, but Norrell heard the turning of pages.

“How far did you get?”

Norrell opened his mouth and closed it.

“Humour me.”

He swallowed. “To the first where you weren’t alone.”

“Oh. Edwin was proud of that one. He painted it, once. Sold it to a man out over Birmingham way and got half a month’s rent.”

Norrell pursed his lips, and Childermass half-laughed.

“Did you like it?”

The breath caught in Norrell’s throat and he coughed. “He draws you well.”

“Didn’t ask your opinion of his draughtsmanship.”

“Mr Childermass-”

“Humour me.”

Norrell nodded, and heard the book close. He refused to open his eyes. Heard the sound of slipping fabric and felt the bed bow.

“I do not wish to make you uncomfortable,” Norrell said past the hard knot in his throat.

“Do I seem like a man made easily uncomfortable?”

Norrell said nothing.

“I would apologise for never having mentioned it, but –”

“You’re not the kind of man who apologises,” Norrell said, in a tone that somehow came close to their earlier back and forth.

Childermass laughed. “You’re allowed to look at me. You’ve already looked at me plenty.”

Norrell opened his eyes, but didn’t lift his head. He could see out of the corner of his eye Childermass’s hands, his bare wrists – he had lost his jacket again, rolled up his sleeves.

Without thinking, Norrell lifted his hand and touched the side of Childermass’s wrist. His touch was shy; Childermass, always bold enough for both of them, turned his arm so Norrell’s fingertips fell across his pulse, traced the thin lines of his veins. Norrell swallowed, ran his fingers up. Childermass shifted, just slightly, when Norrell’s nails traced the inside of his arm.

“Do you know who sent-”

“I’ve no particular desire to discuss just at this moment how much ill-will Cecil Morgan holds for me.”

“Oh.”

The bed shifted again; Norrell chanced a look, saw Childermass settle himself so that he faced him a little better, so they were no longer a little awkwardly side by side.

“I’m not eighteen anymore,” Childermass said, nonsensically.

“You haven’t been eighteen since before I knew you.”

Norrell dared another look then, saw Childermass half-smiling and looking down at the bed, tracing his fingers over the embroidery on the counterpane.

“John,” Norrell said.

“Mm?” Childermass looked at him, his eyes widening slightly when he realised that Norrell was no longer hiding his face. Norrell watched him swallow; watched the split edge of Childermass’s thumbnail catch in the stitches he was tracing. Felt a shiver in his own shoulders, a tension in his jaw.

“John,” he said again.

Childermass leant forward, bracing himself on the bed between them; Norrell, much as he thought he should, didn’t move.

Childermass’s free hand touched light against his jaw; his fingers were cold but Norrell found he knew that, found he had been braced for that. Childermass’s mouth opened, and then closed, as if to speak, but there was a slowness to it that made Norrell think it had not been conscious. The cold touch, running down his neck; pressure as the touch went over his neckcloth. Childermass’s eyes downcast, watching his own fingers. His mouth opened, still soft; every flicker of expression was slowed.

Norrell swallowed, and Childermass flattened his hand out, pressing against Norrell’s sternum with a light kind of pressure that felt so much heavier than it was; Norrell felt pinned by it, as much as he knew he could move. He could move – he should move, but something, that slow shifting of expression in Childermass’s face, the way he would look at his own hand on Norrell’s chest and then up, kept him still.

Norrell opened his mouth. _John,_ he wanted to say. He wanted to deny himself this; to stop, to neaten everything back up, to organise it all the way it had always been organised – but he knew now something of the way Childermass looked when he was vulnerable, and he thought there would hardly be a way to keep that boxed away, like everything else had always been.

Childermass shifted, moving closer, moving further onto the bed, and Norrell turned with him without thinking.

Childermass’s breaths were strangely paced; shallow, too quick. Morgan’s likeness wasn’t as good as he had pictured it; the angle of his mouth, open like this, was wrong – it had a greater sharpness, lacked the soft edge Morgan had given it. It suited him better this way.

The pressure of his fingers on Norrell’s chest slackened; the touch ran down to his stomach, rested there. Norrell, half unthinking, reached out – rested his hand as light as he dared on Childermass’s thigh. Childermass’s head dropped; he looked unaccountably shaken.

“John,” Norrell said.

Childermass’s other hand caught the back of his neck and tugged him forward, kissing him with a tightly-held desperation; a careless, disorganised thing. Norrell found himself overwarm, heavy, quaking at the very edges. Childermass made to pull back but Norrell caught him hard by the upper arms, dragged him in again.

He didn’t try to catch himself as he fell back, unbalanced by his own fervour – Childermass’s half-breathless, half laughing apology – the vaguest edge of tea and tobacco and the softness of his mouth.

Childermass’s hands over his shoulders, down his arms, over his wrists, tangling with his fingers. Strange caught breaths between them, too deep, too shallow; Norrell’s hands unknowing and falling here, there; a thumb dragged over Childermass’s patched stubble, fingertips tracing the line of his neck, his collarbone.

Childermass’s skin against Norrell’s neck, his mouth warm and too-soft, barely there; the shifting of the mattress as Childermass kneeled over his hips, the heavy press of him. The hard line of stays under Childermass’s shirt, like muscle under skin; the rise and fall of his ribs beneath, barely felt. The tie of his shirt beneath Norrell’s fingers, the tangle of the neckerchief he had no patience for – the softness of the skin behind. The new, familiar shape of him; the way his breath caught sharp when Norrell traced the edge of the stays with his nail.

The undrawn things; the impossible things, the way he felt and touched and moved – the things Norrell thought he could have read but hadn’t, could never have. What was always missing and almost-sketched, the gaps between the hesitant lines. Norrell’s own long uneven breaths; the spin in his head, the scrabble of his feet – and Childermass’s slow pressure, a new and torturous control against him, the passing warmth of lips against his ribs, his stomach, his hips. The way Childermass sounded when Norrell caught nails in his back; the way the noonlight would stumble on him and stay there, bright and haloed and casting deep cross-hatched shadows.


End file.
